“THE CLOUD THAT GREW”
In the room over Peter Potter’s grocery, Jason, every day growing
taller, stronger, and developing in mentality, planned for spare time
that he might spend at his books and in taking care of the things that
he and Peter had salvaged for Mahala without her knowledge. As he had
advanced in his work in the grocery, and his benefit to Peter in his
business had become pronounced, Peter had generously recompensed him. In
the new building, the front room over the grocery had been designed for
Jason’s needs. He now had a living room and a small separate bedroom. He
had good lights, a table at which to work, a carpet upon his floor. This
room was a private place, a personal possession of his. With the
exception of Peter Potter and his wife, no one ever had entered it.
Jason had no intention that any one should. There were many things in it
which most of the people in Ashwater would have recognized.
Here Jason found his refuge; this was his place for meditation, for
rest, for study. In the grocery below he worked indefatigably. Every few
days fresh signs of the most attractive nature appeared in the windows.
These signs, surrounded by attractively displayed goods, had been the
means of reinstating Peter Potter. Two other clerks were busy behind his
counters. Jason had drilled them according to his own ideas. They were
not only efficient, but they were also honest. Peter found himself doing
more business than both the other groceries of the town. When he reached
this point he made Jason a partner in truth. Aside from a sufficient
salary, he recompensed his good work with a third of the profits of the
business. He realized that either of the other firms in town would be
delighted to add Jason’s ability, his untiring labour, and his personal
magnetism to its stock in trade. He knew that he could keep Jason only
by making it well worth his while to remain with him.
One day he said admiringly to Jason: “They tell me that young Junior
Moreland is pretty keen on a deal, but I’ll wager that he can’t beat
you.”
Jason laughed as he replied: “Junior will cut circles around me when it
comes to accumulating money because I am forced to be honest and he is
forced to be crooked.”
Peter had a way of opening his mouth wide, and then setting the thumb
and forefinger of his right hand immediately under his nose, he outlined
the orifice. Slowly he indulged in this familiar practice. Finally, when
his lips came together, he was looking at Jason, his head tilted to
intensify his vision, speculation rampant in his eyes.
“Jason,” he asked suddenly, “who taught you to be honest?”
Jason considered his reply and then he said: “Outside of your grocery
and what I learned at school, I can’t remember that any one ever taught
me anything. Marcia never did, and when she let Martin Moreland beat me
when I did not deserve beating, I began to feel that she was not even my
mother.”
Once again Peter outlined a circle back of which his tongue worked, and
then he asked another leading question. “By what right did Martin
Moreland come to your house and beat you?”
Jason’s laugh was bitter, while his reply was: “By the right of riches;
by superior strength, with the consent of the woman with whom I lived.”
Peter thought this over.
“I’ve known a few men in my time,” he said, “who were just naturally
cruel; but Martin Moreland is just naturally a devil.”
Jason assented, and then he asked his leading question of Peter.
“I’ve been told,” he said, “that Becky Sampson goes into George Sand’s
grocery, picks up whatever suits her fancy, and walks away, and that
Martin Moreland foots her bills. Do you know whether that’s the truth?”
“Come here a minute,” said Peter.
Jason followed him to the back of the store. Out of a safe which was a
part of the new building designed to do away with some of his trips to
Bluffport, since Peter had no use for the village banker, he took one of
the old ledgers he had brought back. He leafed over its pages until he
came to one at the head of which was written, “Becky Sampson.” He showed
Jason an account extending over years. He pointed to the foot of each
page where the account was totalled and the total was carried over and
added to the account of Martin Moreland.
As Peter closed the ledger and returned it to the safety of the vault he
said: “I lost a good deal of his business when my store got to its
lowest point. I lost the rest of it when I took you in; but I’ve made so
much more with your help that I don’t care. Martin Moreland always put
my back up like a mad cat’s whenever he came near me, anyway.”
Jason went through his work the remainder of that day without giving
much thought to what he was doing. In the back of his head he was
thinking of the woman, who, from childhood, had been supposed to be his
mother. While she never had treated him as he saw other women treating
their children, she never had been aggressively unkind to him. He had
been plainly fed on the simplest fare; he had been scantily clothed; but
he was comfortable. He never had been forced to go to school with icy
feet and a purple nose. He had always had a warm coat with mittens in
his pocket. From earliest remembrance he had worked all day and in a
manner that produced results. He realized that his deepest thanks were
due to Marcia; that she had taught him to do this, and that, had he not
known how to work efficiently and speedily when he was left alone, he
would have been deserted indeed. If he had not been quick and neat and
efficient, it would not have been in his soul to perform the near
miracle that he had performed in the transformation of Peter’s grocery
from the third in the town to the first. He would not have been able to
draw patronage in spite of the things that repeatedly came to his ear
that the powerful banker was doing secretly to prevent Peter’s business
from flourishing.
There were many things that Martin Moreland could do to any man he had
in his power financially. The one place in which Peter Potter always had
shown deep wisdom was in keeping out of Moreland’s hands financially. In
his worst days, if he had a small surplus to bank, he had left the store
in charge of Jason, climbed into his delivery wagon, and jogged to
Bluffport. So long as he was not under financial obligations at the
First National, so long as his store was fresh and shining, his windows
filled with attractive signs encircled by attractive food in the way of
corroboration, Martin Moreland had not been able either to say or to do
anything that would injure him.
Reviewing all these things, and studying them over, Jason was slowly
beginning to arrive at conclusions. As he grew older and watched the
ramifications of life unfold everywhere around him, he began to see and
to understand and to place his own interpretation upon things that had
happened to him ever since his childhood. Because Marcia had never been
actively unkind to him, because life with her was the only life he had
known up to the time that she had vanished in one black night of horror,
Jason’s thoughts of her were not wholly unkind. As he studied the
situation in Ashwater, as he realized what financial power like that of
Martin Moreland meant in the hands of an unscrupulous man, he found
himself thinking more frequently, and even in a kindlier way, concerning
Marcia. If Martin Moreland were a man sufficiently bright mentally,
sufficiently unscrupulous to encompass the downfall of one after another
of the financial men of Ashwater and adjoining counties, it was not so
very much of a marvel that he might also have in his power a woman who
was standing alone.
Jason began to wonder where Marcia was; what life was doing to her;
whether she really was his mother, and if she was, whether she would be
pleased to see him, to know that he was prospering, to know that very
frequently he made the journey to Bluffport for Peter Potter, and that
in the bank there stood an account to his credit from which nothing ever
had been deducted except for his barest necessities—food, clothing, and
books. With the stigma of his mother’s occupation removed from him, with
the changed appearance through years of growth, sufficient food, and not
too strenuous work, Jason was slowly developing into an attractive
figure. Always he had kept in mind, that if he did make a noteworthy
success of life, he must remember his books. He found that during the
years when he had fixed his lessons in his mind, repeating formulas,
tables, and equations at the same time he was selling tomatoes and
raisins and tobacco, he had acquired what might be denominated the
“habit” of study. He liked to study; he liked to carry a problem in his
head, thrash it out to a certain point, and to experience the feeling of
power he experienced when sudden interruptions diverted his mind, and
yet, with the return of leisure, came the ability to return to his
problem, take it up where he had left off, and carry it to a successful
conclusion. This argued well for the fact that he was able to attain for
himself, by himself, a degree of culture that might possibly surpass
that which others were acquiring in their school work. When Commencement
was over and Mahala no longer entered the store to show him how far the
classes had advanced, Jason had procured for himself higher books and
gone on with what really were the beginnings of a college education.
Somewhere, inherent in his nature, there was a love of the soil. He was
particularly interested in the wagons of the farmers who stopped at the
back door of the grocery with great loads of crisp cabbages, golden
tomatoes, purple beets, silvery-skinned onions, long white radishes with
blue tops, and turnips of the same colour, spreading into great, juicy
circles of crisp tartness. He liked to slice the top from one of these,
peel it, and stand biting into it like an apple, as he negotiated the
purchase of the load and its transfer to the back of the grocery.
Sometimes he went and stood beside the teams and slipped his slender
fingers under the harness, easing it about the horses’ ears,
straightening out the mane, talking to them as if they had been people.
The one thing upon which he had determined was that he would not remain
much longer with Peter Potter, and the other thing about which he had
not determined, but concerning which in his heart he admitted the lure,
was land. He would like to grow such wagonloads of fruits and vegetables
as he constantly handled in Peter Potter’s grocery. He would like to own
a stable filled with cows and calves and sheep and horses. He would like
to have around his feet once more a flock of chickens such as he had
lost upon the night when he lost everything else on earth that belonged
to him except his life and the clothing he wore.
He understood what it meant when boys who had scorned and taunted him at
school began dropping into the grocery and asking him to the backs of
certain buildings after working hours were over. Now that they knew he
had money, they were willing to gamble with him. As he increased in
stature and it became known that he really was a partner in Peter
Potter’s business, there were boys, and girls as well, who began to be
friendly and occasionally he was asked to a party or some social
gathering; but not in one instance had Jason ever accepted any of these
invitations. Firmly fixed in his mind were his days of privation, the
days when he would have been so delighted to be included at the merry
makings devised for other children, the days when his heart and brain
were hungry. Now that he was mentally occupied and physically satisfied,
he could not quite control the feeling of repulsion that crept up in his
heart when he met with an advance on the part of any boy or girl who,
once upon a time, had seared his brain and repulsed his body with the
taunt: “Washerwoman’s son!”
Jason knew, in the depths of his heart, that as the years passed, the
same hunger for love, for companionship, for the diversions of the young
around him, were even stronger than they had been as a child. He
realized that there was something for which he was waiting, something
that he wanted with an intensity that at times seared his body like a
fever, but what it was that he wanted was not a thing that could be
supplied by tardy kindness on the part of his former tormentors.
For four years the bright spots in Jason’s life had been the few minutes
each Friday evening of the school week when Mahala, usually armed with a
list of groceries, had slipped into the store, come straight to him and
put in his fingers the neat slip giving the pages of advance over the
previous week; and sometimes there had been written out the start of a
difficult equation, a hint that read: “You will find a catch in the
fifteenth problem on the sixty-seventh page. You divide by nine and
multiply by fifty-four,” and sometimes she had carried to him for a few
weeks of his use, a volume of supplementary reading that helped him.
With Commencement these things stopped. Almost immediately thereafter,
Mahala’s troubles had begun, and then, to Jason’s bewilderment, there
had speedily come the time when there were things that he could do for
her, things that saved her work, that saved her money, that helped her
to keep her head high and her face pridefully lifted and fronting the
world that so soon had forgotten her. There was beginning in his heart a
yeasty ferment, a boiling up of many things, a wandering and a
questioning, and above everything else, each day more deeply rooted, the
conviction that the same hand that had so much to do with his destiny
was the hand that deliberately had brought ruin into the life of the
girl who, alone of the whole town, had gone out of her way to show him
compassion and human kindness. He was beginning to wonder what there was
that he could do to free Mahala from this sinister power under which so
many others had fallen. He was beginning to study, occasionally to ask
questions, and in his heart there grew a slow wonder as to just what
money was, how it had originated, and why it gave to any man the power
to ride in a carriage, to mingle in the best society, to hold up his
head in the churches, to control for years in the schools and the town
council, in every enterprise in which money or business welfare was
concerned, and at the same time to be the unseen cause of financial
wreck, of physical downfall for other men.
Definitely Jason was beginning to settle in his own mind as to what such
power also entailed in the lives of women. Sometimes, when his thoughts
were skipping over the surface, or delving deep, he thought of Mrs.
Moreland. He remembered her dark face, the pathetic lines around her
mouth. He remembered the story of how she had come to the village upon a
visit in the days when she was young and good looking and richly
dressed. He had been told of the whirlwind courtship of Martin Moreland
and how she had married him, believing that he loved her, and how she
had put her fortune into his hands and was now so dependent upon him
that she might only spend of her own money by charging an account at the
stores which would be paid by a check from the bank. Certainly, she was
not a happy woman. Certainly, she could not be, if she knew anything
concerning the financial transactions in which her husband indulged.
Because she remained the larger part of her time at home and busied
herself about her household affairs, it was generally conceded that she
did not know many of the things that were known concerning her husband.
There was a tendency to speak of her in a whisper as “the poor thing.”
Then one day Jason’s brain found a new subject for consideration. He had
gone to the Bluffport bank, carrying an unusually heavy deposit for
Peter Potter and himself. Standing at a small side desk, occupied with
pen and blotter, going over his account, he caught an oblique glimpse of
a woman entering the door, a woman in the very prime of life, having a
frank face of alluring beauty. He noticed the attractive way in which
her hair was dressed; he noticed the neatness, the dignity, the style of
her clothing. The fact that she was bareheaded told him that she must be
from one of the near-by stores. With the sure step of one accustomed by
a long-formed habit, she took her place at the window of the paying
teller and transacted her business. Jason slid around the corner of the
desk, pulled his hat a bit lower over his face, and gripping the pen
firmly, watched in almost stupefying bewilderment.
It could not be possible; but it was possible. There was no mistaking
the tones of the quick, incisive voice. It was the same voice that had
told him, almost every day of his youth, that his only chance lay
through books. It was the same frame now fashionably, even expensively,
clothed, that had bent above the washtub in the dingy kitchen of his
childhood. It was the same face, with the accompanying miracle of
elaborate and attractive hair dressing and a chamois skin dusted with
pink powder. When Jason’s lips met, he realized that they had been
hanging open until they were dry. Above the marvel of seeing Marcia
standing so confidently at the wicket of the bank, transacting a
financial matter that appeared to be of considerable importance, came
the marvel of the deference with which she was treated by the cashier.
For her the wicket was swung open; for her there were polite greetings
and a few words concerning the weather and outside matters; for her
there was a laughing jest as she turned away and went swiftly as she had
come.
Jason laid down the pen and followed at a distance. One block down the
street she crossed and went into an interesting building on the corner.
From across the street, he looked at the front window, at the side, at
the entrance, and read, in letters of white china placed upon the glass,
“Millinery and Ladies’ Furnishings. Nancy Bodkin and Company.”
Jason repeated it over and over—“‘and Company.’” Did that mean that
Martin Moreland had given liberty to his slave, that she was no longer a
creature of dingy kitchens and the subterfuge of washtubs in order that
for a few night hours she might be the creature Jason once had seen in
the rose-pink environment and the dress of snow? Was Marcia the woman
who could carry such an alliance further, and at the same time look and
move and speak as he had just seen her?
Jason found himself entering the store behind him. It proved to be a
drug store. He bought a glass of milk shake, and sitting down at the
counter, he began a conversation with the clerk as he drank. He started
by remarking upon the wonderful growth of Bluffport—how many new
buildings and how attractive they were. Then he came to the point which
concerned him.
“In all the tidying up you’ve done here in the past four or five years,
I don’t see anything to beat this establishment or the one just across
the street. I’d call that the kind of an enterprise that wouldn’t look
so bad in Indianapolis or Chicago,” he said.
“And that’s a funny thing,” said the clerk. “Ever since I was a little
shaver running around town, Nancy Bodkin has been in the millinery
business here. Good years she managed to make ends meet and bad years
she didn’t. And I’ve heard here lately that she was just at the point of
going bankrupt and giving up in despair when along comes a stranger in
town and they get to work together.”
“Oh,” said Jason, “then the stranger represents the ‘and Company’?”
“Yeh,” said the clerk, “represents the ‘and Company.’”
“And the ‘and Company’ had money to pull the concern up to a corner
building and all that foxy millinery and ladies’ fixings?”
“No,” said the clerk. “That’s the funny part of it. The ‘and Company’
came in and went to work as she stood. There’s been quite a bit of talk
among the womenfolks off and on, but nobody has ever discovered, either
from the ‘and Company’ or from Nancy, where she came from or how she
happened to come. She didn’t have anything but herself, but she knew how
to wash windows and how to clean up. I can remember that I saw her
myself the day she climbed on a store box and started painting the front
of Nancy Bodkin’s store with a bucket of paint and a brush. When she got
it painted on the outside as far as she could reach, she painted it on
the inside. She had such a knack of selling goods and she was so keen
about buying, that in no time at all they pulled right out, and now look
where they are!”
“You think they did it all by themselves?” persisted Jason.
“Sure of it,” said the clerk. “So’s every one else. They didn’t get a
cent of help from any one; the banker says so. This ‘and Company,’ whose
name happens to be Marcia Peters, marched into the bank and told the
banker what she was going to do and she told it so convincingly that he
believed her. He loaned her what she needed for her first order of
millinery, on the strength of her face and her convincing talk. It shows
what a couple of women can do if they put their heads together and
decide that they’ll do it.”
Without realizing precisely what he was doing, Jason reached up and took
off his hat. He hung it over one of his knees and sipping at the milk
shake, he sat looking across the street. He could see Marcia moving back
and forth behind the counters. Once she followed a customer to the door
and stood talking a minute, her face full of interest and animation. She
looked the proud, competent, confident woman of business. He was
possessed of an impulse to cross the street and say to her: “Mother, I
am glad that you are getting along so finely. I’m gladder than I’ve any
words to tell you that you are capable of taking care of yourself.”
When the impulse was quite the strongest, there came to Jason the
realization that the woman he was watching could not, by any
possibility, have been his mother. If his head ever had lain under her
heart through the long journey from conception to birth, if his lips
ever had mouthed at her breast and his babyhands slid over her face, it
would have been impossible for the woman he knew Marcia to be, to have
vanished in the night as she had, five long years ago. It was because
she had not known these experiences, that even the boy sensed as the
life, the heart, and the soul of the experience of women who are
mothers, that she could stand there with her head erect and her eyes
clear, meeting the world openly and unafraid.
She must know that he was in Ashwater. She must know what he was doing.
If she wanted him, she knew where to find him. Since she did not seek
him, since she sent no word, why should he thrust himself upon her? He
could see that she was happy. He could see that she was respected and
prosperous. And he found as he watched her, that there was a feeling of
satisfaction growing in his heart concerning her. She was more of a
woman than he had thought her. She was one human being who had escaped
the power of Martin Moreland and who seemed to have come out unscathed.
As he drove back to Ashwater he was debating in his mind as to whether
he would tell Peter Potter about her and he was finding that he was
consoled concerning her by the knowledge that she was comfortable and
happy.
Jason was right in his conjecture. Marcia was happy. She was happy to
such a degree as she never had hoped to experience. Prosperity was
written large all over the millinery store on the corner. It was written
on Marcia, which made small difference to Bluffport as it had no
realization that Marcia might not always have been reasonably
prosperous. The concern of Bluffport centred upon Nancy Bodkin, who,
following Marcia’s example, had lifted up her head, dressed her hair
becomingly, powdered her nose, and exercised her art upon her dry goods
as well as her head piece.
These two women, each with her own secret in her own heart, so far as
the world knew, formed a combination that was the subject of prideful
commendation in Bluffport. There was not an enterprise in the town in
which they were not interested. When the Grand Army needed help for an
entertainment, they were first class at decorations and resourceful in
suggesting programmes. When a campaign was in full blast, they were of
great help to their party in the decoration of wagons and the management
of parades, and on one occasion, Marcia had stood in the full blaze of
the sunlight of late October upon one of these wagons, in streaming
robes of white, her gold hair unbound and falling almost to her knees,
and shown all Bluffport and the surrounding country what a living,
breathing Goddess of Liberty should look like. When an epidemic of
diphtheria struck the town and the Presbyterian minister lost his wife
and baby, leaving him helpless with another motherless little daughter,
Marcia was sent by the church with lace and veiling to prepare the
bodies for burial. Moving through the house at her work, she definitely
caught the attention of the minister. He noticed her grace and her
beauty. His heart was touched with her kindness to his terrified little
daughter and her ability to soothe and quiet the frightened child. He
carried the thought of her in the back of his head, and when time had
healed his wounds and necessity had driven him to think of replacing his
wife, the memory of Marcia came first to his thoughts and he began
quietly and persistently to seek her company.
Marcia tried to evade him, to escape his attention, but he soon made it
apparent to every one that he was deliberately seeking her. One day he
entered the millinery store carrying an armful of beautiful flowers that
one of his parishioners had given to him. He explained to Marcia that he
thought that she might like to have them, and so he had brought them to
her.
Peering from behind a case of hats, the little milliner watched with
intense interest. If any male person ever had courted her, she never had
mentioned the matter to any one. In her heart there was the interest
which any woman feels in watching another woman whom she loves being
courted by an attractive man. Nancy Bodkin’s lips were parted and her
eyes shining as she saw Marcia’s hand reach out to take the flowers, as
she heard her graciously thank the minister for his thoughtfulness.
Behind them, through the open doorway, she saw the figure of a tall,
slender man whom she knew. He had been pointed out to her years before
on the streets of Bluffport as Martin Moreland, the richest man of the
county seat, the banker, a land holder who had so many farms covered
with mortgages that he was not supposed to know the exact number
himself.
The minister was acquainted with Martin Moreland and at once introduced
him to Marcia. Moreland explained his presence by saying that he wished
to be shown a gray hat displayed in the window which he thought might
possibly make a suitable gift for his daughter Edith. He spent some time
telling the minister in detail what a charming woman his son had
married, the delight he found in spending his hard-earned money for her
pleasure. Then he began playing with Marcia.
At his first entrance he had merely bowed to her and devoted himself to
the minister. After his explanation concerning the hat, he took it in
his hands and examined it critically; he asked her personal opinion of
it; he described the woman who was to wear it; then he asked Marcia to
put it on in order that he could get its effect when worn.
Frightened almost to paralysis, tortured beyond endurance, afraid to
refuse, Marcia put on the hat. It was one that had been built in
particular reference to the lines of her face and head. As she settled
it and turned, her beauty was strikingly enhanced. She was forced to
stand before the two men, turning that they might get the full effect of
it. Moreland admired the hat extravagantly and ended by purchasing it.
While Marcia was packing the hat in a box that he might carry it away,
he said to her very casually: “You have displayed such wonderful art in
the making of hats that evidently the good Lord designed you to be a
milliner. I scarcely think you would be successful should you ever
attempt to be anything else.”
Marcia understood. She mustered the courage to look him in the face as
she replied: “I have not the slightest intention ever to attempt to be
anything except a milliner.”
Moreland laughed; the old crafty look that Marcia so well knew was
gleaming in his eyes. Then he took the hat and left the store with the
remark that since he had discovered a place where such charming hats
could be secured so reasonably, he thought that he would call again
frequently. Swept by sickening waves throughout her being, Marcia had
great difficulty in standing erect and keeping her facial muscles under
control.
The first thing she knew the minister had reached across the counter and
caught her hands. He was telling her that it was his opinion that the
good Lord had designed her to be the helpmate in his clerical work, the
love of his heart, and a mother to his lonely little daughter.
Marcia drew away, telling him that it was quite impossible that this
should ever be. Disappointed, but unconvinced, the minister left the
store, saying that he would give her time to think it over. He would
come again and he would continue to plead his cause until he won.
He had not reached the front door before Marcia rushed to the seclusion
of the back room. She dropped beside a table, covered with gay flowers
and ribbons, and sobbed out her heart to Nancy who had become her friend
in deed and in truth.
Since Martin Moreland had reëntered her life, Marcia contemplated
herself in astonishment. How had she ever dared to hope that he would
drop out of it so easily? Why had she ever thought that there was any
possibility other than that he was merely biding his time, waiting to
crush her, until he could make his triumph over her the greater? All the
sunshine had vanished from her day; all joy was dead in her heart. The
life she must face she visioned as a dreary thing of suspense and fear.
In agony she slid to her knees on the floor, laid her head in the lap of
Nancy Bodkin, and with her arms around her, purged her soul. A few terse
sentences were all that were necessary.
Then in torture she cried to Nancy: “I am tempted to walk into the
church and stand up before the minister and all the people, and proclaim
myself!”
Horrified, Nancy began to protest. She told Marcia what she already
knew: that the public never forgives a woman; that she would be driven
from the town; that she would be forced to start life again among
strangers; and that no matter where she went, Moreland would pursue her
and try to exert his evil influence over her. Marcia stretched out her
hands.
“Nancy,” she cried, “when you say people never forgive, does that
include you?”
Nancy began to cry. She threw her arms around Marcia’s shoulders and
drew her head against her breast, and there she stroked it with shaking
hands.
“No!” she protested. “No! it doesn’t include me. I have not one word to
say. I know nothing about your beginning. I know nothing about your
temptation. I know nothing of the forces—they must have been something
underhand and terrible to drive so fine a woman as you into years of the
life you say you have lived.”
From that day forward it seemed to Marcia that she must never be out of
the thoughts of Nancy Bodkin. Everything that she could do to protect
her, to shield her, she did instinctively. When Nancy realized that
Marcia was beginning to be afraid of the front door, she moved her work
table to a point where she could command a view of it. She began the
practice, whenever there were footsteps and the door opened, of sending
a hasty glance in that direction and then nodding her head or calling to
Marcia, and Marcia understood that in case Martin Moreland entered
again, it was the intention of the little milliner to face him in her
stead.
Because of these things there developed in Marcia’s heart a feeling for
Nancy Bodkin’s breadth of mind, her largeness of soul, and her
clear-eyed judgment, that was pitiful. There was nothing that she would
not gladly have done for Nancy. When she saw the light beginning to fade
from Nancy’s eyes, the colour to pale on her cheeks, she was heart
broken.
And Nancy, in watching Marcia, was hurt infinitely worse. So hand in
hand, the two of them went stumbling forward, making their bravest
effort to meet life having the appearance of being upright and unafraid,
when in reality each of them was filled with dreadful forebodings.